Qwen's Father Junyang Lin Establishes New AI Lab, Aiming for $2 Billion Valuation

According to Dongcha Beating monitoring, Lin Junyang, former CTO of Ali's Qwen model, is currently raising funds for his new AI lab, with a target valuation of around $2 billion. Insider sources revealed that Gaorong Capital and Redpoint China (HongShan) are in talks to participate in the funding round, which could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. Negotiations are still ongoing, and the final valuation may be adjusted, while the lab's name has not been disclosed yet.

For a Chinese AI startup with no product yet, a valuation of $2 billion is almost unheard of. The main reason this price tag can be justified is that Lin Junyang single-handedly turned Qwen into a leading global open-source AI series during his three years at Alibaba, especially with the widespread popularity of low-cost small models among developers worldwide. In early March this year, Lin Junyang publicly announced his departure on X, even before Alibaba officially confirmed it, marking a rare public rift. After his departure, Alibaba merged the Qwen R&D team with other key AI businesses into a new division, directly managed by CEO Wu Yongming, and notably shifted towards a closed-source commercialization path.

Comparable stories in the U.S. have seen even crazier valuations: Ilya Sutskever, former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, saw his SSI reach a valuation of $5 billion just three months after establishment, while the first-round valuation of Thinking Machines Lab led by former CTO Mira Murati reached $10 billion. However, several Chinese investors told The Information that Chinese new AI labs face greater uncertainties: part of the high valuations in the U.S. relies on the exit expectations of being eventually acquired by tech giants, a logic that is not yet established in China; coupled with the ongoing tightening of U.S. chip export controls, acquiring computing power itself poses a significant challenge.